Free The Adding Machine by William S. Burroughs

year old prep school boy on vacation Tausnitch edition Pension in Cannes.
    ‘There’s not a joy in the world can give like that it takes
away.
    When bloom of early thought declines in feelings dull decay.’
    Byron.
    The world weary burnt out look is irresistably attractive to the young and innocent.
    ‘Shredded incense in a cloud
From closet long to quiet vowed
Moldering her lute and books among
AS WHEN A QUEEN long dead was young.’
    Browning.
    The boy thinks this is funny and camps around with a skull mask he will wear tonight at the costume party at the Villa Mauresque where the big writer lives and isn’t he lucky to have wangled an invitation through his uncle in the State Department. How he will astonish them! He has the poem printed on a T shirt with skeleton ribs and he will act it all out like a charade. Some way the Villa Mauresque will be the ‘closet long to quiet vowed’ out of which he will burst ‘as when A QUEEN!!!’ Long dead ... he puts on his skull mask. Now he nonchalantly strips off his skeleton tights and his rib shirt and stands there chewing gum in his insouciant dazzling youth. ‘Was young’ is written across his chest in gilt letters. It was all very tasteful Audrey thought...
    So here is Kim Carson in his remote hideout reading poems over and over. Verses trill and tinkle from icy streams.
    ‘and the stars that oversprinkle
all the heavens seem to twinkle
with a crystalline delight.’ Poe.
    Holding the fish by its tail and its head Kim bites into the back of an eight inch trout. Verses whisper and sigh from grass and leaves. Kim is thinking about Tom’s recent death in an ambush arranged by a certain bounty hunter named Mike Chase. Account to settle. Book keeping he called it. ‘Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees.’ Wordsworth.
    This blank assertion of the finality of death and human mortality from the man who wrote Intimations of Immortality? Wordsworth like so many artists was an alien, Kim decided, an immortal alien feeling the estrangement of human mortality. ‘Old unhappy far off things and battle long ago.’
    He could see Lucy poems written across the evening sky. ‘Fair as a star when only one is shining in the sky.’ Kim looks up at the evening star his hands bloody from cleaning fish. Who was this little twist? Was there some sordid English scene behind this, panted out behind the cow shed?
    ‘Don’t tell your mother and I’ll give ye half a crown.’
    This struck Kim as unlikely. She was a phantom like Wordsworth the English Bard with his walking stick and his black slouchy poet hat and cape and his ‘Dewy fingers cold/ returned to deck her hallowed mould.’ (Collins) These creepy old English poets!
    She was a phantom of delight, a hot English fox maiden fat, mate for a ghostly man of letters self-invoked to haunt ‘This heath this calm this quiet scene/ the memory of what has been/ and never more will be .. .’
    Kim sees flashes of his life with Tom like postcards: ‘Having fine time. Wish you were here.’
    Adding the Lucy poems to our list. There is a literary mystery here. Who killed the poet’s phantom nymphet? Who drew the gradual dusky veil on Lucy. Did the poet sacrifice mortal love for immortal verse?
    I think of this reading list as an organic accretion designed to animate works of excellence or distinction in some capacity. I intend to assemble from the list anthologies of outstanding passages not subdivided into Death/Love/Solitude/Old Age, but arranged by associational affinity.
    There is a fish that lives in very deep water in perpetual darkness. During the mating game the male becomes physically attached to the female and slowly she absorbs him until only his testicle protrudes from the female body.
    ‘The Lord turned and looked at Kim. His face was immeasurably old, smooth and yellow like flexible amber incrusted with layers of cruelty and evil and abominations that stopped the breath and closed round